kerry jones

Whether you’re just getting starting with a content marketing strategy or you’ve been at it for a while, determining what success looks like can be tricky. Managing expectations about what your industry can achieve with content is crucial. For example, if you’re creating content for a universally loved topic, like travel, your content is probably going to have greater potent ...

If you sink enough money into most marketing tactics, you’ll see nearly immediate results. Since content marketing is often an exception to this rule, many marketers mistakenly think their content strategy is ineffective if results don’t come quickly. Content marketing is not a quick fix. If you’re just beginning to execute on a content marketing plan or launching a new stra ...

It’s no secret. Content marketing is driven by results; the higher the number of shares, links and publicity, the greater the mark of success. But to get those high numbers of engagement, you’ve got to provide something that strikes a chord with your audience. Create something that will make them stop to read it, absorb the information and feel moved to share it.

The days of solely identifying with the left side (technically savvy) or right side (highly creative) of your brain are over for marketers, especially for those hoping to land a position in content marketing. A recent study by Fractl (my employer) on “Today’s Content Marketer” determined employers are now searching for hybrid marketers for content marketing roles.

If you’re looking to attract high engagement through content marketing, it’s essential to understand why people choose to share and interact with content. New research suggests that it’s not just individual emotions, such as surprise or anger, that spur high levels of engagement needed to make something “go viral.

Whether it’s news about a “Gilmore Girls” reunion or proof that cats are jerks, BuzzFeed is a creator and curator extraordinaire, and it’s often viewed as the gold standard in viral content. Getting your content picked up by BuzzFeed can lead to millions of views and social shares, but how do they do it? It turns out success on BuzzFeed requires more than kitten GIFs paired with minimal text.

Content marketing results are similar to baseball stats. Over a career, a player will hit a combination of base hits and home runs, and even the best players will occasionally strike out. Similarly, some of your content will be a smash hit, sometimes even going viral, while other times your content will go unnoticed.

There’s no telling how many times marketers have uttered the phrase “let’s turn this data into an infographic” since this visual format shot to popularity several years ago. Infographics have become popular for good reason. When done well, they pack a powerful visual and informational punch. But sometimes infographics are a lazy way of visualizing data or telling a story.

Fractl, my employer, recently teamed up with Moz to examine how a surge of press coverage affects search engine optimization. We picked seven brands that were in just about every publisher’s newsfeed between February 2015 and February 2016 to analyze the impact of major media attention on press mentions, organic traffic and backlinks.

Content marketing and influencer marketing are a natural fit — influencers need valuable content to share with their audience, which is where your content comes in. Many marketers looking to incorporate influencer outreach as part of a content promotion plan make the mistake of choosing influencers based on popularity alone.

Your CEO doesn’t care about the number of tweets a blog post gets or how many times a white paper is downloaded. Instead, the higher-ups in your organization want to hear how content marketing makes or saves money for the business. By communicating the bottom-line benefits, you’ll have an easier time getting internal buy-in on your content strategy.

The era of noisy, low-value marketing is over. With so many people actively resisting interruptive marketing messages, marketers need to reconsider what the ideal marketing strategy looks like to consumers. Fractl (my employer) and Moz recently teamed up to gauge consumer perceptions toward various marketing tactics.

Content marketers can learn a lot about engagement and community building from Reddit’s AMAs. To date, the /iAMA (I Am A) subreddit has more than 9 million subscribers. Within this subreddit are the wildly popular AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) sessions featuring celebrities and people of note responding to questions from the Reddit community.

What do you buy? What makes you loyal to a brand? Where do you spend your time? If you could ask a modern 18-year-old and one from 25 years ago those same questions, you would probably get very different answers. Each generations has its own distinct values and behaviors, so understanding the nuances of different age groups is essential for marketers trying to reach a specific target.

If you’re looking for a content marketing job, you’re in luck. But if you’re trying to hire for content roles, you may find there’s a lot of competition for talent. A recent study by Fractl (my employer) and Moz confirmed there is growing demand for content marketing skills. “The Inbound Marketing Economy” analyzed more than 75,000 job listings on Indeed.

In his recent post about the evolving agency ecosystem, Marketing Land columnist Paul Roetzer said, “Agencies are thriving because the industry is moving too fast for brands to fully internalize the majority of marketing activities.” As part of this rapid rate of change, we’ve seen the rise of content marketing agencies, which offer attractive solutions for brands that don’t ...